The Cyreans did not walk from Sardis to Cunaxa, to the sea and Byzantium. They marched, and marching and walking are not the same. Walking means individuality and freedom. A solitary hiker, for example, determines her own route and sets her own pace. A hiker can stop for lunch, or just to admire the view, when and where she chooses. Confronted with an obstacle, say a fallen tree, she steps over or around it at her leisure. Marching, in contrast, demands obedience to the patterns of a larger organism. A soldier in column must follow the route his officers choose, keep pace with the others in his formation, stop and start only on command. That fallen tree may present only a moment's hindrance to an individual hiker, but for a unit of a hundred or a thousand, the cumulative effect of small deviations as each soldier passes an obstacle can build into a wave of disruptive motion, amplified all the way down the formation.

For the Cyreans, then, marching meant loss of control, the submergence of self in a larger physical entity. Yet, this same submergence brought soldiers closer. The very act of moving together in formation hour after hour, day after day, month after month, fostered a rhythmic, emotional bond among the members of each lochos. No drillmaster needed shout a cadence for them to fall naturally into step – not the artificial, measured pace of the parade ground but a synchronized shuffling tramp.

It all began with sibling rivalry. Darius II (r. 424–404 bc), Great King of Achaemenid Persia, had many children with his wife Parysatis, but his two eldest sons Arses and Cyrus got the most attention. Parysatis always liked Cyrus, the younger of the two, better. Darius, though, kept Arses close, perhaps grooming him for the succession. Cyrus he sent west to Ionia on the shores of the Aegean Sea, appointing him regional overlord. Just sixteen when he arrived at his new capital of Sardis, the young prince found western Asia Minor an unruly frontier. Its satraps (provincial governors), cunning and ruthless men named Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, often pursued virtually independent foreign policies, and sometimes clashed with each other. There were also western barbarians for Cyrus to deal with. Athens and Sparta, now in the twenty-third year of their struggle for domination over Greece (today we call it the Peloponnesian War, 431–404 bc), had brought their fleets and troops to Ionia. The Athenians needed to preserve the vital grain supply route from the Black Sea via Ionia to Athens; the Spartans wanted to cut it.

The Achaemenids had their own interest in this war: after two humiliatingly unsuccessful invasions of Hellas in the early fifth century, they wanted to see Greeks lose. Hoping to wear both sides down, the western satraps had intermittently supported Athens and Sparta, but Darius desired a more consistent policy. That was one reason why Cyrus was in Ionia, to coordinate Persian efforts.

That the structures of lochos and suskenia were central to the lives of the Cyreans should by now be quite clear. So far, our focus has been on the mercenaries themselves, but they were not the only people who made the trek from Mesopotamia to the sea. It is time to examine the place of non-combatants, including slaves, servants, and male and female companions, in the army.

A CYREAN'S WORK IS NEVER DONE

Sometime in January 400 bc the Cyreans reached the Black Sea coast at Trapezus. Having celebrated their arrival with athletic games, they assembled to deliberate their future. First to stand was Leon of Thurii, an ordinary soldier, who had this to say:

The assembly roared in approval. A second Cyrean rose to voice similar sentiments, followed by another, then another. Indeed, every man who stood up to speak reiterated what Leon said. The troops' reaction was hardly surprising. Nearly a year, after all, had elapsed since Cyrus had led them out from Sardis.

When the marching day ended, the Cyreans had to make camp. Whether they stopped for a night or for several months, they expected their camps to provide shelter and safety, a refuge from the grind of marching and fighting. In camp, the soldiers did most or all of their cooking, cleaned and maintained their equipment, groomed and fed their animals. Camps were also the bases from which troops set out to forage for water, fuel, or food. It was in camp, not on the march, that the Cyreans carried on most of their social and political life.

Anyone interested in Roman army camps will find plenty to satisfy their curiosity, from literary descriptions to visual representations to the remains of camps permanent and temporary. In contrast, archaeological evidence for classical Greek military camps is virtually non-existent and literary testimony scarce at best. What little evidence ancient texts provide, moreover, refers not to the unified doctrine of a single military institution, but to a diversity of poleis, each with its own customs. Xenophon furnishes more information than most – his Cyropaedia briefly describes the layout of an ideal Persian camp, and the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians outlines some of the fourth-century Spartan army's camp organization. If the Anabasis brims with stories set against the backdrop of bivouac, though, it never explicitly describes how the Cyreans arranged their halting places.

Though moderns like to portray cooking in ancient Greece as women's work, a closer look at the literary sources reveals men preparing food themselves both at home and in the fields. True, some wealthy Athenian hoplites in the fourth century had slaves to cook for them, but archaeological evidence from Euboea suggests that other Greek soldiers were cooking together in small groups as early as the Archaic period. Indeed, it was no shame even for Homeric heroes to do their own cooking. In an intimate scene from the Iliad, for example, Achilles and Patroclus in camp outside Troy prepare a repast for their comrades: Achilles with the aid of Automedon carving and spitting a medley of sheep, goat, and pork, Patroclus mixing drinks and stoking the fire, then serving out bread while Achilles lays roast meat on platters.

Like Achilles and Patroclus, the Cyreans did their own cooking in small groups, as members of a suskenia. The chow line and mess tent may be icons of modern military life, and professional chefs were familiar figures to sophisticated Athenian gourmets, but no evidence of centralized food preparation appears anywhere in the Anabasis. This absence strikes all the more considering the idealized Persian army of the Cyropaedia. There, Cyrus the Elder's troops enjoy the benefits of full-time quartermasters, company cooks, full-time servers, and organized group feeding. It seems unlikely Xenophon would have devoted so much attention to this perfect mess system if he had already seen something similar amongst the Cyreans.

This book is about an army of Greek mercenaries who marched into Mesopotamia twenty-five centuries ago. Their objective was the fabled city of Babylon, but they never got there. In the spring of 2006, a former student of mine, once a history major and now a US Army captain, returned to campus to say hello after spending a year in Iraq with an infantry company. Ever the historian, he had wrangled a visit to the ruins of Babylon, and proudly showed me photographs. Looking at them, I was reminded that when I first started working on Xenophon's Anabasis in 1996, Mesopotamia was an abstraction for most of us. Now images of the war in Iraq appear daily. Eerie resonances between past and present occasionally emerge. For example, the mercenaries spent the night before the climactic battle of Cunaxa camped not far from the site of what is today Fallujah. As I write these lines, I am reminded again of both hometown friends and former students now serving overseas. I await their safe returns, and hope that someday soon nobody will have to become a warrior to see Babylon.

For most of the mercenaries most of the time, the communities that counted were far smaller than the army assembly, almost 13,000 strong at its acme. They were smaller even than the various contingents of a thousand or more men apiece, although as we have seen contingent loyalties had their place in the life of the army. Instead, the communities that most mattered to the soldiers were those they interacted with on a constant and intimate basis, day in and day out for the nearly two years of the campaign. One of these communities, the lochos, was a formal tactical and administrative unit, mustering roughly 100 men. The other, the suskenia, was an informal small group, numbering perhaps ten or fifteen comrades at most.

FORMAL STRUCTURE: THE LOCHOS

The lochos, or “company,” was a common building block of many classical Greek citizen armies. The Argives, Boeotians, Corinthians, and Megarians, for example, all mustered hoplites in lochoi. The Athenians too had lochoi, an unknown number of which comprised each of their ten tribal regiments. In hoplite militia forces, lochoi were probably temporary groupings of varying strength rather than permanently defined units. At Athens, for example, the size of each tribal regiment and its component lochoi seems to have depended on the manpower needs of any given expedition, and hoplites might not always take the field in the same lochos.

This book has its origin in the Carlyle Lectures delivered at Oxford University in Hilary Term 2005. I would like to thank George Garnett and the other members of the Carlyle Committee for honouring me with their invitation to give the lectures, and the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College for extending to me their hospitality for the period concerned. I benefited greatly from discussing matters arising from the lectures with members of the audience during my time in Oxford. In composing a work of this kind, I have inevitably drawn on the learning of a large number of scholars who have written extensively and expertly in aspects of my subject. In addition, colleagues and friends have generously read my work or parts of it in draft and given me encouragement and advice. They include Margaret Atkins, Tim Blanning, Anthony Bowen, Peter Brown, Myles Burnyeat, Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi, Patricia Crone, John Crook, Michael Frede, Raymond Geuss, Richard Gordon, Verity Harte, Caroline Humfress, David Ibbetson, Melissa Lane, Geoffrey Lloyd, John Marenbon, Dieter Nörr, Michael O'Brien, Glenn Olsen, Christopher Rowland, Magnus Ryan, Malcolm Schofield, David Sedley, Quentin Skinner, Gareth Stedman Jones, John Thompson, Robert Tombs and Frank Walbank. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Raymond Geuss, Richard Gordon and Caroline Humfress for raising my sights and lifting my spirits. Niketas Siniossoglou has given me invaluable assistance in the closing stages. My family has been as usual tolerant, patient and supportive.

There were six lectures in the first instance.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

In 1840 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon of Besançon, a printer and an autodidact, published What is Property? and answered his own question: ‘Property is Theft.’ Karl Marx was twenty-one years of age at the time, and writing his dissertation for the University of Jena on the difference between the natural philosophy of Democritus and of Epicurus. After a brief opening chapter on methodology, Proudhon moves on to definitions. He begins in this way:

‘Roman law defines property as the right to use and abuse a thing within the limits of the law’ – and he provides the Latin: ‘Jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus iuris ratio patitur.’ Abuse of property, he says sardonically, is really indistinguishable from use of property. One way or another, the proprietor can do what he likes with his land. He can ‘let the crops rot underfoot, sow his field with salt, milk his cows on the sand, turn his vineyard into a desert, and use his vegetable garden as a park’.

Further definitions follow. According to the Declaration of Rights, published as a preface to the French Constitution of 1793, property is ‘the right to enjoy and dispose at will of one's goods, one's income, and the fruit of one's labour and industry’.

Introduction

This chapter takes tomb architecture as the starting point for the examination of changing Etruscan attitudes to surface and boundaries from the seventh century to the fifth. It will argue that the surface of the tomb not only marked the physical distinction between inside and outside the tomb, but also formed the interface between the living and the dead. The period under consideration saw dramatic changes in Etruscan funerary monuments: the massive burial mounds (tumuli) of the Orientalising period were characterised by their size and wealth, extending as far as 50 metres in diameter, and containing up to four tombs, each with multiple chambers, all reached by an entrance corridor (dromos); by contrast, the sixth century saw a decrease in the size of funerary monuments and a change from circular to rectilinear monuments that were now arranged in orderly rows.

The reasons for such changes have been thought to be increased foreign contacts, technological advances, restrictions of space, or socio-political considerations. An example of the latter is the interpretation of the stylistic unity of the tombs from the late sixth century on, taken together with their increased number and decreased size. With particular reference to the cemeteries of Cerveteri, this has been seen as the result of the rise of a ‘ceto medio’, or middle class, at the expense of the old elites who had been buried in the large mounds.

INTRODUCTION

Plato's ideal polity, or Kallipolis, is often characterized as a communistic society, in part or as a whole. Communism has been recently defined in this way:

The author proceeds to apply this (perfectly acceptable) definition to the ideal polity of the Republic: ‘The idea of communism as collectively owned property first appears in classical Greece. Plato's Republic contains a notable defence.’

This claim is mistaken. There is no collective or communal ownership of property in the ideal state of the Republic. Rather, Plato has Socrates prescribe for the political leadership and military (the Guards and Auxiliaries) an absence of property (coupled with a denial of individual families), or, to view it from a more positive angle, a community of use and a community of minds, involving the sharing of basic accommodation and subsistence, women and children, feelings and emotions.

INTRODUCTION

On 7 May 1318 four men were burned at the stake in the market place of the city of Marseille. According to a contemporary writer:

The four victims are only names to us; the writer was Angelo Clareno, a member of the Franciscan order, Fratres Minores, or Brothers Minor. In protest at what he saw as laxity and corruption in the Order, Clareno tried to form a breakaway group more in tune with the ideals of St Francis. He won temporary success, when Pope Celestine IV created for them a new Order called the Poor Hermits of Pope Celestine, under his own rather than Franciscan jurisdiction. However, Celestine was forced out of office after only four months (in 1294), his acts were nullified by the new Pope, Boniface VIII, and the Poor Hermits fled to Greece (in the first instance).